It’s that time of the year again. Since I skipped my annual Christmas desktop showcase last year, I’m going all out for 2008. Not only is there a screenshot, but an animated GIF of the desktop, including a Christmas-themed browser (Firefox). To top it all off, I’ve linked to all the apps and images I used to create this seasonal extravaganza in case you want to create your own.

2. Snow (download zip) is the best Xsnow equivalent I could find for Windows. The default options are okay, but I like me some more snow. I ran it with these options in the screenshot: snow -num 100 -side 10 -down 10

3. Animated Christmas tree. Mousing over the tree displays the number of days until Christmas. The site has a variety of tree styles to choose from.

4. The Tinseltown Firefox theme turns Firefox into nothing but Christmas (Warning: it gets old pretty quick). Another Christmas theme switches between daytime and nighttime scenes based on the current time.